The American Cancer Society has estimated that almost 1.5 million new cases of cancer will be diagnosed this year. This includes carcinoma in situ of the urinary bladder but excludes those of other sites such as basal and squamous cell skin cancers. Approximately one out of every two American men and one out of every three American women will have some type of cancer at some point during their lifetime.
One means of targeting cancer is by early screening and detection as well as diagnosis at an early disease stage which allow for treatment and prevention of later stage disease. A number of cancers when detected, screened or diagnosed early, can be more successfully treated. Although a number of therapeutic remedies exist, a continuing need remains for additional tools to better aid in preventing, screening, diagnosing and targeting a cancer with the appropriate therapeutic regimen. Such tools, for example, involve tumor-associated antigens of the cancer testis family against which both humoral and cellular immune responses have been observed in patients with different types of cancers.
Clinical trials on the use of tumor-associated antigen-specific vaccines are underway and show promising preliminary results. For a vaccine which is used to treat tumors expressing the targeted tumor-associated antigens, it can be useful to determine which TAA are expressed by a patient's tumor. Detecting the level of expression of specific TAAs in tumor tissues provide a convenient method to obtain the expression profile of TAAs in a patient's tumor. Hence diagnostic tools that can complement such cancer therapies are of value.